Research: Sizing Up Small Classes

Over the past decade, the state of Nevada has spent almost $500
million to keep class sizes under 20 students in the early grades.
While four evaluations of the program have been conducted since 1993,
officials at the state education department still have little proof
that the long-running initiative is really improving student
achievement.

"The problem is, they've never given us enough money" for a
comprehensive study, says Mary Snow, an evaluation consultant at the
Nevada Department of Education. Even the studies that were conducted
were paid for by school districts, not with funds appropriated by the
legislature.

State officials, though, are still proposing a detailed research
plan, and Gov. Kenny Guinn has asked lawmakers for $374,000 to do the
work.

In recent years, reducing class sizes in the early grades has risen
to the top of the nation's school improvement agenda. At least 20
states, as well as the federal government, now have
class-size-reduction initiatives, and teachers' unions tout the
approach as the best alternative to private school vouchers.

"The Effects of Small Classes
on Academic Achievement: The Results of the Tennessee Class
Size Experiment," a paper by Barbara Nye, Larry V. Hedges, and
Spyros Konstantopoulos, published in the Spring 2000 edition of
the American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 37, No.
1, pages 123-151.

Already this legislative season, several governors have called for
more spending to keep such programs going or to launch new ones. For
example, in Georgia, Gov. Roy E. Barnes wants to spend $18.9 million to
extend his year-old class-size-reduction initiative into the 4th and
5th grades. And in Colorado, Gov. Bill Owens wants class-size reduction
to be paid for with a portion of the revenue from a recent ballot
measure that is expected to bring in $4.5 billion over 10 years.

To find out whether their investment in smaller classes is paying
off, some states—such as California, Tennessee, and
Wisconsin—are also spending millions of dollars on research.

But Nevada has not been alone in displaying little enthusiasm for
conducting formal evaluations of its class-size initiative. And even in
states that are conducting such studies, some observers wonder whether
researchers are asking all the right questions as they examine the
impact of fewer students per class.

Research Money Hard To Find

New York state is in its second year of implementing a voluntary
class-size-reduction plan that was passed as part of a comprehensive
school improvement package in 1997. More than 300 of the 700 districts
in the state are now participating in the program, which is targeted
first at low-income communities.

Funding for the effort, which brings class sizes to an average of 20
pupils in grades K-3, stands this year at $140 million. Gov. George E.
Pataki wants to raise that to $225 million in fiscal 2002.

Money for research, however, has not been as easy to obtain.

Gary Pollow, a supervisor of education programs with the New York
education department, says he has had to piece together some funding
from within his office to get a research project going. He has even
asked the U.S. Department of Education for a waiver to use some of the
money from the federal class-size-reduction program for the study,
which will be conducted by Syracuse University.

Researchers will compare achievement levels—to be measured by
scores on state tests—of students in the smaller classes with
students' performance in the years before the program began.

Another focus of the project will be to examine the qualifications
of the 4,000 teachers who have been hired for the initiative.

‘Reducing
class size is the necessary precondition. Then you follow up with
staff development.’

Increasingly, both educators and some researchers say they are
convinced that teachers, and what they do in smaller classes, are the
real key to whether class-size reduction improves student
achievement.

Simply reducing the size of a class may not be enough. The real
payoff appears to come when teachers shift their practices to take
advantage of having fewer students.

Perhaps the strongest research support for that viewpoint so far
came earlier this year from Wisconsin. Researchers investigating the
state's Student Achievement Guarantee in Education, or SAGE, program
found that some teachers in reduced-size 1st grade classrooms were more
effective than others in the smaller classes.

Specifically, pupils performed at higher levels when teachers used
one-on-one contact to focus on strengthening basic skills, provided
frequent feedback, and asked children to discuss and demonstrate what
they knew, the researchers found. The less effective teachers spent
more time on problem-solving and project-oriented activities, and gave
students more choice.

"Reducing class size is the necessary precondition," says Alex
Molnar, one of the three principal investigators for the SAGE study and
the executive director of the Center for Education Research, Analysis,
and Innovation at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. "Then you
follow up with staff development."

Shift in Strategy Urged

Administrators trying to carry out California's class-size-
reduction initiative,which sets the maximum pupil-teacher ratio in the
early grades at 20-to-1, are also learning that lesson.

"Having smaller classes certainly provides more opportunities for
students to be known and to have better communication with families,"
says Neil Schmidt, the superintendent of the 12,500-student Santa
Monica-Malibu Unified School District. "But if it ends up doing that
depends on whether something parallel happens, and that is staff
development of teachers and strategies being changed."

California is spending a lot of money to find out whether its $4
billion class-size-reduction initiative is making a difference.

The RAND Corp., a research organization based in Santa Monica,
Calif., and the American Institutes for Research in Palo Alto, Calif.,
are leading a four-year, $2.5 million research project that is focusing
on a range of issues associated with the effort to reduce class sizes.
The state is contributing $2 million to the research, while the rest of
the money comes from a combination of federal and foundation
grants.

While slight gains in student achievement have been reported since
the initiative began in 1996, most of the findings have focused on the
problems districts have had in putting the program in place. A shortage
of qualified teachers and a lack of adequate classroom space have led
some observers to label class-size reduction— at least in
California—a failure.

"They rush in to reduce class size everywhere, and then they have no
ability to say anything about its impact," says Eric A. Hanushek, a
senior fellow on education policy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University.

‘Teachers do things differently in small classes, and they
do some of the more important things more
differently.’

Barbara Nye,
Professor of Education,
Tennessee State University

A more responsible approach, Hanushek says, might be for states to
phase in such programs so they can first conduct controlled experiments
to find out if smaller classes are worth the expense.

Hanushek also argues that reducing class size is not nearly as
effective as improving the quality of teaching.

Class-size reduction, he adds, is popular because it's a "simple,
easy program" to communicate to state legislators. And while
policymakers often include staff development as a part of such
policies, states aren't giving that aspect of smaller classes serious
thought, Hanushek suggests.

"California's law says that teachers should have staff development,
but there's never been any clarity about what that means," adds Joan
McRobbie, the California liaison at WestEd, a federally financed
education research laboratory in San Francisco and one of the
organizations involved in the California study.

'An Important Question'

One researcher in California says he hopes his team will eventually
be able to take a deeper look at the issue of teaching practices,
including whether some teachers are more effective than others at
making the most of smaller classes.

"I think it is an important question," says Brian M. Stecher, a
senior social scientist at RAND. "But we're limited by what we've
promised to do."

So far, Stecher and Cathleen Stasz, a colleague of his at RAND, have
found few major differences between the practices of teachers in
reduced-size classes and those with more students.

Teachers in both situations generally covered the same material in
mathematics and language arts, and covered those topics for the same
length of time, their research has found. But teachers in smaller
classes spent a little more time working individually with children who
were identified as poor readers. As similar comparison studies in other
states have shown, the California researchers also found that teachers
in the smaller classes spent less time disciplining students.

Some researchers maintain that simply having fewer students
automatically makes teachers more effective.

Some researchers
argue that simply having fewer students makes teachers more
effective.

"Teachers do things differently in small classes, and they do some of
the more important things more differently," says Barbara Nye, a
professor of education at Tennessee State University and one of the
principal investigators for the best-known study of class-size
reduction, Tennessee's Project STAR.

Getting to know parents, because there are fewer of them, is one
thing teachers in smaller classes can focus on more intensely, Nye
says.

The researcher agrees, though, that another frontier of research
remains to be crossed: looking at the teachers who have the best gains
in student achievement in smaller classes, and then sharing that
knowledge with others who are also teaching in those classes or will be
in the future.

Both Nye and Molnar, however, note that it's unrealistic to expect
the lessons learned from studies on reduced class sizes to be very
useful to teachers in larger classes.

The impact of class-size reduction on teachers will also be part of
a study on the federal government's effort to lower class sizes. That
Clinton administration initiative aims to bring classes in the early
grades down to an average of 18 students nationally by providing money
to help hire additional teachers. For the current fiscal year, Congress
appropriated $1.6 billion for the effort, which was launched in 1998.
Researchers are collecting data for the study—which is being
conducted this winter and spring—and hope to release their
findings next fall.

Abt Associates Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.- based research organization
that is conducting the federal study, intends to "document changes in
instructional practices through extensive classroom observations and
self-reports of those teachers observed," according to a summary of the
project. The researchers will also look at efforts to train
teachers.

Other Angles To Pursue

One state is pursuing a slightly different research question about
teachers' practices.

Because Indiana's initiative, which is called Prime Time, pays for
classroom aides to bring down the pupil-teacher ratio in K-3
classrooms, researchers at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., are
looking at how teachers are using those assistants—whether to
handle clerical duties or to provide instructional help for students.
The researchers will present their findings in April at the annual
meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

An early review of the data shows that teachers are using their
classroom aides, in most cases, to instruct students.

"We're not finding that they are just collecting the lunch money,"
said Daniel K. Lapsley, the chairman of the educational psychology
department at Ball State.

Prime Time, which began in 1984, was one of the earliest efforts of
its kind in the country. Just a few years ago, the state legislature
reduced the "target ratio" of pupils to instructors (which includes
teachers and teachers' aides) to between 15-to-1 and 18-to-1. The
average ratio had been as high as 20-to-1.

In addition to conducting a survey of teachers throughout the state,
the researchers studying Prime Time intend to spend time observing
classrooms, Lapsley says.

Other projects under way include one in Georgia, where instead of
focusing just on children entering public school, the researchers at
Georgia State University's Applied Research Center will be tracking the
progress of children who first attended the state's publicly financed
prekindergarten program.

Past studies have shown that the achievement benefits of that
preschool experience begin to fade in the 2nd grade, especially for
children in what the state used to call its Special Instructional
Assistance Program, which served children performing below grade
level.

When it comes to the future of class-size research, much will
depend on whether states spend enough money to pay for sound
studies.

"Our pre-K kids were in classes of about 18 kids," says Gary T. Henry,
the director of the Georgia State center. "Then many of them went into
classes that were larger than 24 students."

The researchers will begin with a sample of 500 prekindergartners
this coming fall and then follow some of them into regular classes in
the early elementary grades, which have also been reduced to fewer than
20 pupils per instructor. They will also follow other children who are
participating in the state's new Early Intervention Program, which is
replacing the Special Instructional Assistance Program. The average
student-teacher ratio in the EIP is 11-to-1.

Whatever direction states take with class-size reduction, Nye of
Tennessee State says, the public shouldn't necessarily expect the same
results from classes of around 20 students as those of 15 or even
lower. "It's taken a lot of time to get that message across," she
says.

That point became important in recent years as policymakers sought
to extrapolate from studies of Tennessee's student-teacher achievement
ratio—or STAR—program. That controlled experiment began in
1985 and included 79 elementary schools in 42 districts. Students were
randomly assigned to small classes of 13 to 17 pupils, large classes of
22 to 26 students, or large classes with a full-time aide.

After four years, researchers found that the smaller classes were
associated with higher academic achievement than the larger classes,
especially for minority students. Ongoing research has found that
children who were in the smaller classes continued to outperform their
peers from larger classes, even after the students entered classes with
larger pupil-teacher ratios.

When it comes to the future of class-size research, much will depend
on whether states spend enough money to pay for sound studies, says
McRobbie of WestEd. "People don't study it if funders aren't funding
the studies," she observes.

Some educators and researchers worry that without further studies
yielding evidence that smaller classes improve academic results, state
leaders could begin wondering whether the money directed to cutting
class sizes might be better spent elsewhere.

Yet McRobbie predicts that even without more research, the
popularity of class-size reduction is unlikely to fade anytime soon.
"If there was no change in test scores, there would still be people who
would argue that it was a good idea," she says.

The Research section is underwritten by a grant from the Spencer
Foundation.

Also, listen to an Economic Policy Institute panel
discussion on the class size policy debate, featuring the authors
of the above reports. (Requires the
RealAudio Player.)

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